Irina Ratushinskaya

Irina Ratushinskaya was born in Odessa, then part of the U.S.S.R., in 1954. She graduated in physics and married Igor Gerashchenko, a physicist. They worked for human rights in Kiev, photographing books and signing an appeal on behalf of the dissident physicist Sakharov. Both of them became Christians, though they did not acquire a Bible until 1980. Irina worked as a primary school teacher and her poems were published in samizdat. The two of them were arrested in Moscow at a protest in 1981 and held for ten days.

Irina was again arrested in 1982 and sentenced to seven years for “agitation against the Soviet regime.” While in prison, she smuggled her poetry out to her husband who published it. The poetry celebrated the small good things happening around her, such as frost on the windows. She became one of the most well-known Russian dissidents in her time. She was released early, in 1986, just ahead of the summit between U.S. president Reagan and Gorbachev, the Russian premier. She was 32.

I became aware of Ratushinskaya through my reading of The New York Review of Books, which featured her plight in prison, and then interviewed her in 1987 on her release. I was fascinated that she was close to me in age (nine years younger), and that her trials were going on half a world away from me. In my journal, on 11.12.87, I wrote:  “If I look at houses with lighted windows imagining that behind them ordinary, happy people live, how must it have been for her to look out at the mountains and know that beyond them were her husband and friends.” 

When her book Grey Is the Color of Hope was published in 1988, I learned exactly what her thoughts and experiences in prison were. In it she writes of the friendships she made with the other eleven political prisoners in “the small zone” in a notorious penal colony in Mordovia as they tried to preserve their humanity. They made gloves, tried to plant a few vegetables and, when one of them was sent to the horrifying Shizo isolated, unheated detention, tried to protect each other.

On the day she was released, October 10, 1986, Irina wrote in thanks to those who had kept her name alive:

Believe me, it was often thus:

In solitary cells, on winter nights
A sudden sense of joy and warmth
And a resounding note of love.
And then, unsleeping, I would know
A-huddle by an icy wall:
Someone is thinking of me now,
Petitioning the Lord for me.
My dear ones, thank you all
Who did not falter, who believed in us!
In the most fearful prison hour
We probably would not have passed
Through everything – from end to end,
Our heads held high, unbowed –
Without your valiant hearts
to light our path.

After her release, Ratushinskaya and Gerashchenko lived and worked in Chicago and then in London, where their twin sons were born. They wished to give their sons a Russian education, however, so they began attempts to reclaim their Russian citizenship. They returned to Moscow in 1998. There, Irina continued to write, her books translated into many languages. She died of cancer in 2017.